


take me away

by PoeticallyIrritating



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: F/F, Road Trip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-06
Updated: 2015-01-16
Packaged: 2018-02-28 05:34:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 15,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2720627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PoeticallyIrritating/pseuds/PoeticallyIrritating
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A few months post-s2. Cosima shows up at Delphine's hotel with a car and a duffel bag.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Day One

**Author's Note:**

> I have been working on this for several months now and I have Many Emotions about it. It should update once a week on Friday evenings, if all goes well. Also on [tumblr](http://sapphicscience.tumblr.com/post/104447486828/take-me-away-an-orphan-black-fanfiction-day).
> 
> Warnings for illness and death discussion.

Delphine is awakened in the middle of the night by someone pounding on her door. Thinking blearily that she’d thought she left the days of this sort of thing back at university, she stumbles out of bed and opens the door to the hallway.

Without the aid of her contacts, it takes a moment for her eyes to resolve the fuzzy shape standing at the door into a small dark-haired woman with familiar glasses on her nose. “Let’s go,” she says, and Delphine’s sleep-addled mind does not understand. Cosima shifts her weight anxiously from one foot to the other, and Delphine registers the duffel bag slung over her shoulder, the red coat draped over her arm, the way her dreads are done up in a bun.

“Cosima,” is all she can manage.

“Hey,” she says. Her smile is crooked, Cosima and not-Cosima. “I’m gonna, uh”—she clicks her tongue, gesturing with her thumb—“skip town. Like, now-ish.”

“This could not have waited until tomorrow?”

There’s an apology in her smile. “Not, uh, not so much.” She cranes her neck, peering into the room. “Can I come in?”

Delphine steps aside wordlessly. Cosima drops her bag and paces.

“Cosima,” Delphine asks, watching her agitated motion, “have you done something illegal?”

Cosima slows, and chuckles. “No more than usual.”

“Then—?”

“It would be, like, really cool of you to maybe…not ask.” And Delphine nods, unsure exactly what she’s agreeing to.

She comes to realize that she’s not wearing pants, and reaches for the closest pair, black jeans draped over the back of a chair. Her suitcase is stored in the closet; she drags it out and begins to transfer clothing to it from the drawers. “Where are we going?” she thinks to ask.

“Away,” says Cosima.

“You have a car?”

“Yeah, outside.”

Delphine’s belongings are few, these days. It takes ten minutes to pack up the hotel room, and ten more to wake up the dozing night clerk and convince him that, yes, she really does need to check out right now. And then she’s pushing her suitcase into the trunk of the station wagon in the parking lot. “Where did you get this?” she asks.

“College friend,” says Cosima, waving a hand vaguely. “Owed me, like, a kinda huge favor.”

Delphine asks no more questions. She crams herself into the passenger seat, knees crushed against the dashboard until she can find the seat adjustment with her right hand.

“You can sleep if you want,” says Cosima. Delphine nods, but she has never been able to sleep in moving vehicles. Instead, she unzips her boots and tosses them in the backseat, and her sock-feet press against the floor mats as they drive into the darkness. The moon is setting, but something of its pale light still makes it through the windows, painting Cosima ghostlike.

As they drive on, the sky turns from black to deep blue. Cosima is silent, more so than Delphine has ever known her.

The horizon lightens to their left. “We are going south,” says Delphine.

Cosima nods. “Southwest,” she amends. “Eventually. But right now we’re gonna cross the border. Which means we actually have to go kind of…east? Not far now.” At Delphine’s questioning look, she says, “I feel, uh, safer, in my own country—I know, I know, land of the un-free, whatever, I get it. But, like, I think we’ll be okay; I’m like ninety percent sure DYAD doesn’t have a search out on either of us yet.”

Delphine hums in response, looking out at the gray sky. “Not far?”

“Like an hour.”

Border control between Canada and the United States is more a formality than anything else; they are sent through with a minimum of questioning, but Delphine’s heart is still pounding when they make it out the other side. Perils of being an immigrant, she thinks, watching Cosima’s easy grace with the officers.

It’s eight a.m. when Cosima exits the highway in search of McDonald’s. “You want anything?” she asks.

Delphine gestures to the gas station next door. “I would really like a cigarette.” She smiles a wry apology to Cosima’s lungs.

“Anything in the, like, food department?”

“Perhaps a coffee.”

McDonald’s coffee is not the worst coffee Delphine has had in America. She downs it without difficulty, but the empty pack of cigarettes in her purse is still nagging at her. Cosima obliges, pulling up to the gas station in one of the least graceful parking jobs Delphine has ever seen—she has a breakfast sandwich in one hand and a coffee in the other, and is mostly driving with her forearms. She rolls clean over the curb and looks at Delphine sheepishly. “Go for it.”

The gas station does not carry Delphine’s preferred brand, but she buys the second-best option. “Hey,” says Cosima, as Delphine sits back down and puts her card back in her purse, “we should probably find a bank. Like, stock up on cash and ditch the cards, you know. Just in case.” She shrugs. “DYAD’s got bigger things to worry about, but it’s, like, probably better not to leave a trail of credit card charges across the continent.”

 _Across the continent._ They find a bank within a few miles. Delphine cleans out her checking account, tucking a stack of twenty-dollar bills into her purse, and Cosima does the same. The excess goes in the glove compartment.

They stop at a diner for lunch. It’s the kind of place that serves a mix of regulars and passers-by, where the waitress calls everybody “hon” and brings free refills on coffee. Cosima coughs for the first time that day at lunch, painting one of the diner’s cloth napkins red because there was no time to reach for a tissue. She presses an extra twenty into the waitress’ hands before leaving. “Sorry about the napkin,” she says; “kinda a side effect of dying.”

They are half an hour from the diner when Delphine finds her voice. “Dying,” she says.

Cosima’s hands tighten around the steering wheel. “Yeah,” she says. “Kind of, like—inevitably.” The car slows for a moment; her foot has slipped from the gas pedal. “Uh, soon.”

“How long?” Delphine asks, because that is what a scientist asks.

“Like…a couple of months.”

Delphine nods. It will not do, to cry now. Her fingernails dig into the flesh of her palms, and her knuckles turn white as Cosima’s.

It’s ten p.m. before they speak again, beyond a few frustrated outbursts during the hours they spend stuck in traffic. They’re driving by an illuminated red sign: Motel 6. “Hey, Delphine,” says Cosima. “I know it’s, like, not super luxurious, but I’m kinda falling asleep at the wheel here.”

“It will be fine,” says Delphine. Her smile feels forced.

They park in a narrow space in the parking lot—Cosima runs over the curb again, nearly side-swiping the car next to them—and cart their luggage into the lobby of the motel.

“One room,” says Cosima.

The man nods. “One bed?” Delphine can’t place his accent, something South Asian, but his inflection makes it difficult to tell if he’s asking a question or not.

“No, uh, two beds.” She glances at Delphine.

He shakes his head. “One bed only. You need two rooms for two beds.”

Cosima eyes Delphine again. “Uh—I—”

“It’s fine,” says Delphine. “You should not pay for two rooms.”

Cosima waves her hand in a don't-worry-about-it gesture to the concierge, and pays. She nudges Delphine with her shoulder as they walk towards the stairs to the second floor. “Sorry if that was weird of me, I just—uh—you know, it’s been…a long time.”

Delphine nods. Between Frankfurt and the hospital, between Delphine in Europe and Cosima in sterile white rooms, it has indeed been a long time. “No,” she says. “I understand.”

“Yeah?” Cosima shifts her bag to her other shoulder as they mount the stairs. “If it’s not, like, totally middle school of me to ask—where are we with that?”

“I love you,” says Delphine, and the words fall easily from her mouth. She swallows the lump in her throat before continuing: “I love you, and I do not want to waste what time you have left.”

Cosima suppresses a cough. “Okay,” she says. “Then I guess we’re on the same page.” She shifts her bag again to get the key card out of her pocket. She slides it into the slot on the door, which beeps and flashes a green light to signal that they’re able to enter. “I think I’m gonna shower,” she says as she shrugs off her bag. “You can sleep if you want. I’ll be there in a few.”

Delphine pulls the cigarettes from her purse once Cosima is safely in the bathroom. There is no balcony in a motel like this, but the walkway outside the front door is open to the air and looks over the parking lot, so she pockets the key card and heads out. She lights one leaning against the railing, and looks out at the lights on the highway as the end of her cigarette flares orange and the smoke curls into the air. It burns her lungs and the back of her throat; it steadies her hands. (She can’t tell if Cosima’s noticed the shaking, but it started the moment she got in the car.)

When she gets back inside, the hair dryer is running. She slips into a cotton tank top and, after a moment’s consideration, a pair of pale-blue pajama pants. (The moment of consideration includes: Cosima’s skin against her skin, the way their legs slide bare together, the unruly pounding of her pulse as she thinks of this.) She eyes the bed, but cannot bring herself to get into it—some foolish watch-dog sensibility, no doubt, not letting her sleep before Cosima. Instead she pulls out her laptop and deletes a dozen urgent emails. Leaving DYAD has not caused them to stop contacting her; she has a month’s worth of requests for research updates festering in her inbox. The inefficiency is almost laughable—The DYAD Group, specializing in human cloning and failing to remove ex-employees from email lists.

Cosima emerges from the bathroom in a pair of cotton shorts and an oversized T-shirt: East San Francisco High School Science Fair, Second Place, 2002. “Only second?” asks Delphine.

Cosima looks down at her shirt and chuckles. “Andy Bryant totally bribed the judges,” she says. “And they were, like, super biased against me anyway.”

“Ah,” says Delphine, smiling. “An injustice indeed.” She shuts her laptop. Cosima turns down the bed and claims the side by the window, and Delphine gets between the sheets after her, shuts off the lights as Cosima curls up facing the edge. Delphine turns the same way, a mockery of contact, her body shaped as if to mold to Cosima’s but removed from the possibility by half a meter of space. She is almost asleep when Cosima finds her voice. “Goodnight, Delphine,” she says. Her voice is hoarser these days.

“Goodnight, Cosima,” says Delphine.

 

 


	2. Day Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: illness, death, PG-13-ish levels of sexual activity.

Delphine wakes to the morning sun streaming through the windows and the sight of Cosima perched on a stool at the mirror, applying her eyeliner.

“Morning,” she greets. “Hurry up, I’m _starving.”_

The clock on the bedside table blares _8:30 AM_ in red. Delphine feels as if she could sleep for another twelve hours. She rakes a hand through her hair (with little success; her curls have become tangles in the night) and forces herself to sit up stiffly in bed. She would like to shower before leaving, but Cosima, who is normally so cavalier about timing, has something restless in her hands, and Delphine suspects that a shower may not be on the agenda. She stumbles to the bathroom and splashes water on her face, digs out makeup remover and wipes days-old eyeshadow from the creases of her eyelids. Re-applying feels excessive—they are on the run, in a way, after all—so she makes do with nothing but tinted lip balm. She runs product through her hair with her fingers until it resolves itself into curls again.

They’re on the road again within half an hour. Delphine comes to realize, with the rumbling of her stomach, that neither of them has eaten anything since lunch the previous day, and Cosima seems to have forgotten about breakfast. “Aren’t you hungry?” she asks.

“No, I, uh, I was, but then—” She mimes vomiting over the wheel of the car. “Still feeling it, you know, from the treatment. Sometimes. But, uh, God, I’m an idiot, sorry—you need breakfast, I forgot.”

Delphine wants to say, _No, we can keep moving, don’t stop on my account,_ but she’s not entirely sure Cosima can’t hear the growling of her stomach. Instead she nods. “Anywhere is fine.”

They end up at an IHOP, surrounded by images of pancakes covered in jam and whipped cream, at least half including chocolate syrup. It makes Delphine nauseous to look at; she orders the most unassuming plate she can find on the menu: scrambled eggs with bacon. She also orders a large coffee. “Sure thing!” chirps the waitress. Cosima orders a glass of water.

“I assumed,” says Delphine, “that you checking out of the hospital last week was a good thing.”

It’s sudden, inappropriately so. Cosima stares at the table and her hand grips the edge of it. “I dooon’t really want to talk about it.”

Delphine nods but says nothing. They sit in silence, Delphine bracing her fingers against her thighs, until Delphine’s food arrives.

Back on the road, Cosima begins flipping stations on the radio. The age of the car means it has no station seek button, and Cosima has to press the arrows to change to the next frequency each time. They are treated to long stretches of varying levels of static interspersed by short blares of sound—a country singer bemoaning the loss of his wife or an advertisement in rapid Spanish. Cosima eventually gives up and shuts it off. “I’m bored,” she says, and glances over. “Want to take me to a lecture by a neo-eugenicist?”

“I think those days are over,” says Delphine. It’s an effort to keep her tone light; it is harder for her than for Cosima, to joke about these things. She sucks her bottom lip between her teeth. It seems the time to say something else, but the only thing that comes to mind is _I’m sorry_ and she is not a liar anymore, or she is trying not to be. The few weeks of Delphine Beraud still weigh heavy in her, though, almost enough to force the apology out.

“Tell me something,” says Cosima, apparently sensing the unease in the air.

“Tell you…?” Her insides are awash with ice, suddenly; she thinks of darkened hotel rooms and dresses like costumes.

“I dunno, anything.” (Delphine breathes again, the directionless nature of the question confirmed.) “Tell me about your parents.”

“Eyes on the road,” Delphine reminds her gently. When the car is safely in its own lane, she lets out a slow breath. “Maxine and Yannick,” she says. “My father is a doctor—a medical doctor, I mean, not scientific like us.”

“I’m not a doctor,” Cosima reminds her.

“But you w—” _Will be_ dies on her tongue, the foolishness of the future tense catching up with her after she’s already started the sentence. “Well, I am,” she amends. “But he is the other kind, a man who saves lives. My mother is a lawyer. Her face is, ah, strict—stern—but she is a good woman.”

Cosima nods, saying nothing, so Delphine continues. “I grew up in Paris until I was twelve, and then we moved to a house in the countryside.”

“And then you went to college in Paris, right?”

Delphine makes a sound in the affirmative. “For undergraduate and graduate school.”

Cosima taps her hands on the steering wheel, drumming to an imaginary song. “What was the house like?”

“Well, my parents, they still live there. It is beautiful—I think the word might be _idyllic_ in English?”

Cosima nods.

“Yes. Green hills, surrounded by vineyards. I used to”—she blushes suddenly, but continues—“in secondary school I had a boyfriend, and I would take him into the vineyards to kiss.”

Cosima grins. “Sounds a little like Napa. I bet I could find some vineyards to make out in.”

Delphine’s chest thrills with the words; it’s the first time Cosima has mentioned these things to her in a long time. She does not know where Napa is and she’s afraid to ask, afraid of touching Cosima and of not touching Cosima. “It’s a date,” she says, and forces her voice not to tremble.

If Cosima feels the significance of the statement, she doesn’t show it. “Cool,” she says, and grins.

Cosima seems not to be hungry again, so lunchtime comes and goes without comment from either of them. Eventually, “We’re gonna be in Chicago by dinnertime,” says Cosima, breaking an hour-long silence. “I mean, it would have been sooner if I hadn’t gotten all turned around back there, but uh…yeah. Even though road-tripping broke is super romantic and everything, I’m not exactly short on cash here if you want to go out somewhere nice and, like, sleep in a room that doesn’t smell like piss.”

Delphine smiles and indicates her phone. “I can make a dinner reservation.” After a few minutes of browsing, they decide on an Italian place with prices that are, comfortingly, practically Parisian. (The website also points out helpfully that the restaurant is adjacent to a bar.) The place is booked solid until nine p.m., so Delphine makes a reservation for nine. Next comes the hotel; she browses until she finds one with vacancies for the night. Cosima chokes at the prices—four hundred a night—but Delphine waves her off. “You’re an expensive date,” says Cosima, and Delphine laughs, a soft almost-nothing of a sound. “I will pay,” she says. “I can take responsibility for my tastes.”

They check into a room on the fourteenth floor—“Thirteenth,” Cosima corrects, more than once—with a coffee maker and a king-size bed. Cosima sinks down into the pillows, arms outstretched, while Delphine peels off her pants and heads into the bathroom to shower. She sheds the rest of her clothing on the bathroom floor and steps into the hot spray. With the hotel’s soap and her own shampoo and conditioner, she scrubs away two days’ worth of sweat and grime, and then she reaches for the razor she left on the counter and lathers her legs and armpits, shaving away a few days’ growth of hair. When she’s done, she stands in the water, breathing deeply as it runs down her body and steam builds up on the tiled walls. She thinks of Cosima—and she wants it to be simple, to think of her and let her hand stroke between her legs—but the word _Cosima,_ now, is tied up in a lot of other words, words like _blood_ and _sick_ and the phrase that feels like a constant, pounding headache: _a couple of months, a couple of months._ She stays in the shower until the thoughts are burned out of her, turning up the water higher and higher until it feels like her skin might blister. And then she shuts it off.

Cosima’s watching TV when she comes out, some movie with mediocre special effects that Delphine doesn’t recognize. She’s sitting cross-legged on the bed, and when the door to the bathroom opens she gets up. “Thought you’d drowned in there,” she says, teeth poking out of her mouth as she smiles. “It’s almost eight.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, and can’t help but notice how easily the words come out under normal circumstances. “I got—distracted.”

Cosima gathers up her clothes. “Well, getting to see you in a towel kinda makes up for it.” Delphine glances down at the white towel knotted under her arms. “Like, more than kinda.” She grins as she heads for the bathroom.

Once the bathroom door is closed again, Delphine unwraps the towel and uses it to rub the water out of her hair. She pulls on underwear, hooks a bra behind her, and stands in front of the mirror taming her hair, using product and her fingers to convince the unruly mop of blonde to form manageable curls again.

When Cosima emerges from the bathroom, fresh-faced and more energetic than Delphine has seen her in ages, it is eight-thirty. “You should hurry,” says Delphine. “If we do not leave soon, we will be late for our reservation.”

They’re late, but only by five minutes. Cosima tilts her head at the _maître d’_ in that way of hers, and he sighs and takes them to their table. Cosima seems to have found her appetite; she consumes what must be half her body weight in bread and olive oil before the waiter even comes to take their order, and then she orders pasta with meatballs. Delphine’s order is fettucine alfredo, and when it arrives the cream sticks to the roof of her mouth, a luxury in the States with its paradoxical obsession with low-fat milk.

Cosima seems light somehow, in a way she hasn’t been since their first days back in Minneapolis. The tension in her shoulders has eased, and she’s gesturing with her wine glass, ruby liquid threatening to slosh over the sides, as she explains the finer points of genetically modified rice and its implications for the epidemic of vitamin A deficiency in Africa. Delphine knows of this—it’s mostly old news—but Cosima’s read the latest literature and her hands are flying about distribution methods and alternate implementations and Delphine, pleasantly tipsy, laughs at the inevitable spatter of wine onto the white tablecloth.

Sometime during dinner, their hands meet, and they spend the rest of the meal with their hands clasped, resting on the table. Delphine traces Cosima’s thumb with her own as she listens to her speak.

At eleven, they pay their (fairly exorbitant) bill and adjourn to the bar next door, a high-class place with sleek black countertops and a bartender with hair in a tight bun. The clientele is mostly wealthy-looking: silver-haired men in business suits, women in tailored dresses, fashionable twentysomethings discussing modern art. Dressed up, Delphine in a fitted black dress and Cosima in burgundy, they fit in. Before they enter, Delphine pulls a tube of red lipstick from her purse and applies it carefully, pressing a lip print to a paper napkin and tossing it into the trash.

Cosima orders shots and Delphine, despite having not done shots since university, cannot think of a single reason that this is a bad idea. She takes them one right after the other, one-two-three, and as she’s ordering a glass of wine to wash down the taste, her hands tingle and her vision begins to blur around the edges.

“Whoa,” Cosima says. Delphine notes with embarrassment that there are only four glasses on the bar total; she has taken one of Cosima’s shots without realizing. “That was…”—her eyebrows are raised—“kinda hot.”

“I cannot decide,” Delphine explains, “if we are at a wedding or a funeral.” She sees Cosima’s brow furrow and realizes that she is possibly not making sense. “I mean—”

“Nah, I get it,” says Cosima, and downs her own shot with a shiver that runs the length of her body. “Either way you need a drink, right?”

Delphine nods, relieved to have been understood. She sips the wine that arrives slowly, conscious of a need to remain aware of her surroundings. Still, by the time they catch a cab back to the hotel, she is six drinks in and, even with the intervening factor of the alfredo, more than a little drunk. There’s energy crackling under her skin, and Cosima’s presence beside her is a hot, electric thing, growing throughout the ten-minute cab ride. By the time they reach their room and Cosima fumblingly lets them in, it is unbearable.

She meets Cosima’s eyes before leaning in, and her acquiescence is clear in the tilt of her head, in the way her hands gravitate to the wrap around Delphine’s shoulders, tugging at it with something urgent in the set of her hands. Delphine reaches for her waist, tugs her closer—the wrap can wait; her lips are on Cosima’s for the first time in months and she wants to cry at how much she missed this, how _physically_ she has craved Cosima all this time.

It takes a few minutes for Cosima to guide them to the bed. Delphine stumbles when the backs of her knees bump into it, and she falls back, Cosima tumbling on top of her. Their teeth knock together at the sudden change in direction, and Cosima’s laughter further interrupts their kiss—but their lips meet again, fumbling into place. Cosima tries for the wrap again, but now it is trapped between Delphine’s back and the bed; Delphine lifts her shoulders to let the fabric slip from beneath them. Cosima’s mouth finds her neck after a moment, but the angle is impossible, Delphine’s legs hanging off the end of the bed and Cosima crouched over her like a wildcat. Cosima sits back. “Okay we need to…like…adjust.” She pushes herself off the bed and lets Delphine sit up and move back. “God,” she says, looking at Delphine with something hungry in her, “you look—” Her sentence cracks in the middle, and she turns, frantic hands hunting for the tissues in her purse. Delphine gets there first, pressing one into her hands as she convulses.

“Delphine—” The words come out almost before she’s done coughing, bubbling from her lips with the blood. “I’m so sorry.” Delphine’s hand strokes up and down her back, and she murmurs soft hush-sounds next to her ear.

When the sound of Cosima’s breathing gets less harsh, Delphine rises and wets a paper towel in the bathroom. She presses it to Cosima’s mouth, wiping away the blood to reveal more red marks that she realizes belatedly are lipstick smudges.

“I’m still an adult,” says Cosima next to her, a little rueful. “You don’t have to—”

“You do not need to do everything on your own,” says Delphine. She gets up to throw away the towel, and after a few moments Cosima stands shakily and goes to rinse her mouth and brush her teeth at the sink. Delphine unzips her dress and switches it for pajamas, and in the opposite corner of the room Cosima does the same.

When Delphine gets in bed, Cosima is staring up at the ceiling.

 _“Chérie,”_ Delphine murmurs, as she slides in next to her.

Cosima is silent for a while, and then she hums a soft sound before speaking. “Kinda wish I could skip the whole body-breaking-down thing.”

Delphine doesn’t know what to say to that, so instead she reaches over and squeezes her hand. She’s lying on her side, looking at the profile of Cosima’s face, lit from behind by the lights of the city outside the sheet curtains.

“Like, I think I’m okay with the dying part, I just…”

Delphine’s laugh comes out bitter. “Then you are doing better than I am,” she says, and tries to keep from her voice the knowledge that she would destroy gods to keep Cosima with her.

She needn’t have worried; Cosima barely seems to hear her. “I just, like…don’t really want to watch it happen.”

Delphine traces the length of Cosima’s arm. Seeing her in silhouette, it’s easy to tell when her eyes well up, and Delphine reaches over to wipe away the tears that have leaked from the corner of her eye. “I will be with you,” she says. “Until—” The words get stuck in her throat. She stops and begins again, speaking soft and firm this time. “Until the end.”


	3. Day Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the usual illness & death warnings. this chapter is explicit; you can read the version with the most explicit parts cut out [here](http://sapphicscience.tumblr.com/post/105659781928/take-me-away-day-three-alternate-version).

Cosima gets up before Delphine, gets up with the light starting to stream through the curtains. She doesn’t seem to be able to sleep late, and Delphine did not spend enough nights with Cosima before her illness to know if she has always been this way or if it is a new, desperate _carpe diem_ urge.

They pack up mostly in silence, the previous night heavy on their shoulders. The evidence that Cosima didn’t remove her eyeliner before going to bed is smudged raccoon-like around her eyes, and Delphine sees from a bleary look at the mirror that her mascara has achieved much the same effect. They stop for coffee on the way out of town, and Delphine drinks hers black and wishes for wine.

Cosima’s driving is better when she’s miserable. Delphine notices this through the haze of her own red-eyed stupor; she wonders if she has a hangover or if the headache splitting her skull is merely the result of crying herself to sleep. (It does not, she reflects, matter that much. It is probably a combination; both are dehydrating.) She takes two aspirin from her purse and watches Cosima’s hands. Where before they would fly off the steering wheel whenever she thought of something to say, they are now meticulous in their movements. Every turn of the wheel is precise. Her fingers curl around it and Delphine notices with a sick lurch that the rings on her fingers are sliding more than they should—all of her is thinning.

She doesn’t mention it. Cosima has surely noticed, the way tight-fitting dresses have started to hang baggier on her shoulders—to bring it up would be to invite Cosima’s misery to deepen. At the very least, it’s hard to see the road through tear-blurred eyes, and Delphine has no desire to go careening off the edge of the interstate.

As they drive on, the land turns to cornfields, tall green stalks flicking by the window. Delphine looks outside and watches the rows blur together as she hums along to the song on the radio, a crooning ballad by a pop star she can’t recall the name of. Iowa now, and these fields and the bent backs over the earth feel utterly foreign. When Cosima cracks the window, the air is pungent with something sweet and nauseating all at once. “Fertilizer,” she explains.

It takes until mid-afternoon (and nearly the edge of the state) before they find a place to eat, a dingy burger joint that has “Bubba’s Burgers” painted onto the wooden sign in the front. As they step inside, Delphine glances around—two men nursing brandies at the bar on a Wednesday afternoon—and asks Cosima, “Are you _sure_ this is better than McDonalds?”

“Hey, all the reviews on Yelp gave it five stars.”

“Eight is an inadequate sample size,” Delphine starts to say, but Cosima has already gone to wait at the counter. “And online reviews are a self-selected sample,” she can’t help but add, as they take their place in line.

Cosima laughs. “Delphine, you need to, like, chill.”

Her smile is apologetic. “I am hungry,” she admits.

Delphine’s burger is huge and greasy, only really edible with the aid of the plastic knife and fork she swiped from the counter. Cosima, across the grimy table from her, is picking at her basket of fries. “Are you all right?” Delphine asks, gesturing in the direction of the plate.

“Yeah, I, uh—” She indicates her abdomen. “Still acting up.”

Delphine stabs another piece of her burger and chews and swallows it before responding. “How long has it been since you stopped treatment?” she asked, knowing it’s impossible to sound casual, trying desperately to do so anyway—as if she were inquiring about the weather forecast, or Cosima’s favorite movie.

Cosima pushes her plate away. “Uh, like—six hours before I picked you up.” She swirls the ketchup on her plate with a fry, pulling it in dizzy circles until Delphine has to look away, suddenly feeling nauseous herself. “It wasn’t working,” says Cosima. “After the whole graft versus host thing, they tried…I mean, you’ve been mon—keeping track of my treatment, so you already know.” She twirls one of her dreads between her fingers. “Whatever. The point is, their latest witch-doctor cure didn’t work either. They basically said they can make me comfortable.”

Delphine’s stomach clenches, and she looks away from Cosima and from her food, eyes settling on a speck of dust on the table that is resting on a particularly large spot of grease. “I’m sorry,” she says, because she is and there is nothing else to say.

“So I threw up, like, a hundred more times, and then I checked myself out.” She looks up, still holding a fry in her hand. “What, _Doctor_ Cormier, no comments about my irresponsibility?”

“I think it is noble,” she says. Noble, and stupid, and _unfair unfair unfair._ Then: “The doctors gave you a prescription, yes? Opioids of some sort?”

Cosima jiggles her purse; Delphine hears the sound of pills rattling. “Yeah, not gonna leave without that. How much d’you think I’d have to take to get super high?” Delphine’s face barely has time to register her disapproval before Cosima laughs, a half-hearted broken-winged sound. “Kidding. Not that that doesn’t sound kind of amazing right now.” At Delphine’s questioning look, she shrugs. “Gotta save them, right? And I’m not gonna, like, drive on oxy. Sooo…the pain situation right now: not great.”

Delphine bites her lip.

“A couple of months,” she says, as they get back in the car.

“Yeah,” says Cosima. “Thanks for the reminder, I’d almost forgotten.” There’s viciousness in the turn of the steering wheel as she merges.

“No, I mean”—she swallows the urge to fight back—“how many?”

“Uh, they said—two, maybe three. I mean, I don’t—shit!” She swerves onto the shoulder as an oblivious eighteen-wheeler thunders by, changing into their lane apparently without noticing the tiny station wagon it almost barreled into. They skid to a stop in the dirt, and for a long time the only sounds are Cosima’s breath, the hum of the engine, and the fierce wind-sound of cars passing by.

“Are you all right?” Delphine asks carefully. Cosima did not slam on the brakes, no airbags deployed, nothing was hit—there’s no reason for either of them to be hurt. She asks anyway.

“Maybe,” says Cosima, but her hands are shaking. “Kind of a loaded question these days.”

“Do you want me to drive?”

“Your license is like three years expired,” says Cosima. “And French.”

“I may be less likely to get us pulled over,” Delphine says. But Cosima’s hands are gripping the wheel like a lifeline, and after a few long minutes she merges back onto the highway.

The sun hasn’t even set when Cosima pulls into the Wooded Meadow Inn & Suites, which fails to live up to its picturesque name; their room is small and stinks of old cigarettes, despite the large NO SMOKING sign on the door, and the TV remote is missing batteries and at least two of its buttons. Aside from its offer of a free continental breakfast, its only positive quality is that it is close to the highway. Cosima drops her bag on the floor and goes to shower; Delphine takes off her boots and sits cross-legged on the bed watching Animal Planet.

When Cosima emerges, damp and wrapped in a white hotel towel, she looks livelier, pink in her cheeks. She has her hair pulled back out of the way and has managed to keep it mostly dry. “Hey,” she says, “you wanna get in the shower? I’ll find someplace to grab dinner.”

The shower is grimy too, even though it’s clearly been cleaned—there’s something indefinably, inherently dirty about it. (Delphine is not quite over the injustice of having to stay in miserable roadside motels when both of them can afford much better.) She tolerates it well enough, ties back her hair to keep it from getting wet and runs through a quick soap of her body. “So, there’s another burger place and a 24-hour diner in walking distance,” Cosima reports when she emerges.

“I do not think I can eat another burger.” She smiles, apologetic.

“Cool. It’s all up to you—I’m not really, uh, up for eating still. I’ll get fries again, or whatever.”

“Walking distance?” she asks.

“Yeah. Kinda shaky.” Cosima holds up her trembling hands as proof, forcing a grin behind them.

“The diner, then.”

The restaurants are beginning to blur together; Delphine is ninety percent sure that this waitress and the waitress at the previous place had the exact same first name, and the scent of the apple pie that Cosima picks at is oddly familiar. Cosima runs to the bathroom halfway through the meal to cough blood into the sink and the way she smiles with red-stained lips reminds Delphine of the first diner, the one where Cosima told the waitress she was dying.

They walk back to the motel in the dark. The black sky turns to a deep blue close to the horizon, and it’s scattered with stars. Cosima’s hand grips Delphine’s, small and sure, and she looks up at the sky and murmurs the names of the constellations, her other hand sweeping arcs across the sky.

“I never studied the stars,” Delphine says.

“What, never?”

“Not voluntarily. I did not understand the…mm, enormity. And by the time I did…” She shrugs. “There was other work.”

“It’s what got me into science in the first place. My dad used to name them for me, you know? And tell me—burning balls of gas, way out there in space—it was the first time I understood, like, how big it all is. Well, I mean, I didn’t, but—to get an idea, you know? It’s the first time I remember being…” She thinks. “In awe. You know?”

“Now I do,” says Delphine, soft, tracing her thumb over Cosima’s finger. She’s not looking at the sky.

Cosima snorts. “Smooth.”

“Sorry?”

“I saw the way you were looking at me.” She stands on tiptoe to kiss her, sweet and brief, tongue swiping the seam between Delphine’s lips before she pulls away. “Trying to get in my pants?”

“I was not—” she protests, but is interrupted by Cosima’s laughter.

“Well, I mean, you might be in luck.”

Delphine’s breath catches at the words and she feels immediately foolish, like a teenager; her heart is pounding, blood thumping a hot steady pulse in her neck. She doesn’t trust herself to speak, so instead she squeezes Cosima’s hand, feeling the prominence of her knucklebones. Then: “Do we have anything to drink?”

“I saw a liquor store on the way, but I’m, uh, kinda feeling sobriety tonight.”

“Understandably,” says Delphine, and doesn’t let go of Cosima’s hand.

Cosima convulses, coughing, as they get into the motel room. She discards half a dozen tissues in the wastebasket and says “sorry” as she emerges from rinsing out her mouth in the bathroom.

“You should not apologize for this,” Delphine murmurs. She’s sitting on the bed, cross-legged. Her boots have been discarded in the closet, and Cosima takes off her shoes to match and pads barefoot over to the bed. She sits beside Delphine and holds her hand tightly, squeezing so hard that Delphine feels her trapped pulse throb futilely in her fingertips. “Are you all right?” Delphine asks.

Cosima’s laughter comes out bitter. “You’ve got to stop asking me that.”

“Short-term,” she amends.

She chuckles. “Uh, I can’t stop shaking. And…I hurt everywhere, and I don’t have tissues in my pocket so I’m kind of scared I’m going to cough blood all over the bed. So…not great.”

It’s instinct, mostly, that leads Delphine to kiss Cosima. She doesn’t think about it until she’s already done it. Cosima’s lips are greedier than she expected; she sucks Delphine’s lip between her teeth and makes a sound like a groan, a soft desperate thing. Delphine pulls back just enough to press her forehead against Cosima’s. “Are you—”

“Don’t ask me again.” It’s harsh, harsher than she means, it seems; she murmurs an apology. “Sorry, I just—” Her eyes meet Delphine’s. “I…want you.” Delphine feels the shrug of her shoulder more than sees it, and the movement of Cosima’s shoulder against her arm, the barefacedness of her words, send arousal and affection blooming all through her. She leans into Cosima’s kiss like falling, and her skin burns.

Cosima pulls back, eventually, to unbutton Delphine’s shirt. Her hands are shaking, but when Delphine makes to do it herself, she shakes her head. “Let me,” she says, and pushes the next button through, working her way down. Delphine tries not to react to the brushes of Cosima’s fingers against her torso, but by the time she’s down to her bra she is biting her lip very hard—and when Cosima discards the button-up on the floor she reaches to take off Cosima’s glasses and set them on the side table, traces her hands up her sides as she removes her shirt. She is used to Cosima soft and healthy. The feel of her ribs, prominent beneath her skin, is jarring. She bites back the nausea and heart-thumping fear at the touch, focusing on getting the collar of Cosima’s shirt over her nose without catching.

Cosima reaches for her the moment her shirt is off, nestles her hand at Delphine’s waist and kisses as if to devour. She inches forward until she’s straddling Delphine’s lap and their torsos are flush together, skin to skin in a way that Delphine had forgotten was possible. Cosima’s hands stroke up and down her back, and when they catch on the band of her bra one time too many she fumbles with the hook to remove it, and does the same for her own. Then they are pressed together again and Cosima is feverish against her skin; every part of her is too hot, her tongue on Delphine’s neck, her hands on Delphine’s back, the stretch of her skin. A droplet of sweat rolls into the hollow of her neck and Delphine licks it, drawing a low moan from the back of Cosima’s throat. The sound turns to a rasp. Cosima jolts, reaches with one scrabbling hand for the box of tissues on the bedside table and coughs a spattering of blood into one. She drops it into the wastebasket beside the bed and Delphine is kissing her again, tasting metal and salt, sick, stomach roiling and skin flushed with desire. And Cosima breaks the kiss and arches over her, bends to suck bruises from the skin of her neck. Her fingers are fumbling with the button of Delphine’s black jeans, and eventually she gives up and crawls off her lap, her smile apologetic. “Can you—”

Delphine obliges, pulling off her pants and tossing them onto the floor. Her underwear is black cotton, mismatched with the bra that’s already been discarded, and she slides it over her legs with something that feels oddly like shyness. (Or perhaps it is not so odd; it has been a long time and this awkwardness is not new to her—she recalls the lace-impeded stroke of Cosima’s tongue, that first time in all its guilty giddiness; unfair, she thinks, that she has lost that joyful, solid Cosima. It has been a long, long time, and she has never had time to get used to this, with Cosima.)  Cosima is not shy in undressing, even now; she removes her own underwear and Delphine tries not to look at the sharpness of the bones in her hips.

Cosima looks at Delphine, the sweep of her eyes making Delphine feel more naked than before. “Have I ever told you that you’re, like, crazy beautiful?”

“Perhaps,” says Delphine, and it’s all she can get out and keep tears from welling in her eyes; her stomach clenched painfully at the softness in Cosima’s voice. “You must,” she says, “stop talking as if you are speaking your last words.”

“Those would kinda suck as last words,” says Cosima. “You think I should start coming up with something now?”

“Cosima, please.” The brokenness is clear in her voice.

“Sorry. Just trying to, uh…lighten the mood.”

“I do not know if that is possible.”

Cosima sways slightly, leaning forward. “Can I still kiss you?”

Delphine does not remember wanting anything more. She surges to meet Cosima and their lips crash together ungracefully. Cosima lands such that her knee slides between Delphine’s legs, the sudden pressure startling Delphine into a gasp. Cosima hums a satisfied sound against her mouth, something halfway to laughter. “I missed you,” she murmurs. Delphine almost says it back, but it seems so inadequate to describe something so physical and desperate. _“Tu m’a manques,”_ she murmurs instead, and hopes the French conveys her import— _this is so important that I could not bring myself to say it in a language that is not my own._

Cosima sits back on her heels and makes a sound like suppressing a cough before rocking forward again to kiss Delphine, her lips blood-tinged. There’s something sweet in the taste of her mouth, behind the copper-taste of blood, and Delphine remembers the apple pie at the diner, flaky and heaped with homemade whipped cream. She wonders: can Cosima taste her after-dinner coffee, beyond the sick metallic sweetness in her own mouth?

Cosima sighs into her mouth. Delphine swallows the sigh, gulps it greedily with the stroke of her tongue. Her hands burn against Cosima’s body, fingers trailing sweat across feverish skin, and Cosima surges into her, leg pressing into the juncture of her thighs. She is everything, Delphine thinks, before her thoughts are fractured by the nip of Cosima’s teeth on her lip, the way she hums against Delphine’s jaw and the movement of her lips, the vibration of her breath sending tremors down her side.

There’s something desperately _right_ about it, as Delphine leans in and presses Cosima backwards into the sheets. Cosima smiles, sucking red from her teeth as she does, and Delphine closes her eyes against it. She marks a trail down Cosima’s neck with lips and tongue. Cosima’s thigh presses into her, and she thumbs one of Cosima’s nipples and she teases around the other with her mouth, just enough that Cosima finally lets out a whine and murmurs, _“Delphine”_ with something like urgency. She gives in, sucking it into her mouth, tonguing until it peaks and Cosima sighs something soft and satisfied. There is salt on Delphine’s tongue as she kisses down Cosima’s stomach; she sucks at her skin, hot and desperately alive, and closes her eyes against the jut of her ribs.

She pauses, head between Cosima’s legs, and laughs softly into the skin of her thigh. “I cannot—” She pulls back and gestures to the awkward tangle of limbs she has found herself in, crouching with knees and elbows off at odd angles. She slides off the bed and tugs at Cosima’s calves; Cosima obligingly scoots forward, smiling in a way that is somehow soft, not a broad Cosima grin. Delphine sinks to her knees on the floor.

“Oh—” Cosima says, startled, as Delphine’s mouth reaches her. And then, with a groan, “oh.” Delphine’s fingers dig into the flesh of her thighs. “Delphine…”

Cosima, when she does this, likes to tease. She laughs against Delphine, pauses to grin up at her, drags it out for as long as possible—but it still takes focus, for Delphine, especially now that it has been so many months, and Cosima’s breath is coming ragged now and she is afraid, afraid that they will not finish before Cosima’s lungs betray her again. Cosima’s thighs spread to let her in and one of her legs goes over Delphine’s shoulder, heel digging into her back. Cosima shakes, and shakes, and Delphine grips onto her like the edge of a cliff.

Cosima comes on a noise that would sound like a sob if Delphine didn’t know better, if she didn’t have an intimate understanding of what Cosima sounds like when she sobs—she comes on a long gorgeous sighing moan of a sound, and she is not coughing.

She is not coughing and then she is coughing, and even though Delphine has been bracing herself for it this whole time she feels it like thunder in her chest. Cosima is not fast enough reaching for the tissues and she spatters her hands with blood.

And then she is—laughing.

“Cosima?”

“Unbelievable,” she says, and stumbles out of bed on wobbly legs to walk naked into the bathroom and clean herself up. “Stay there,” she adds, when Delphine makes to follow her. “Give me five minutes. It’s been, like, four months since I’ve gotten you off, but I bet I’ve still got it.” Her grinning fangs are blood-tinged.

While she’s gone, Delphine climbs onto the bed. She shoves the comforter onto the floor and wraps herself up in the sheets. Cosima is flushed pink when she returns and seems energized; she bounds up to the bed and kisses Delphine fully, holding her close, the sheet trapped between their bodies. Delphine reaches to touch whatever skin she can reach around the sheet, and every press of skin not impeded by the fabric takes her breath from her.

Cosima’s hand finds her, the press of her fingers clumsy but determined, probing until they reach the hot slickness of her arousal. She hums her satisfaction at Delphine’s startled jerk and kisses her with the force of a hurricane.

It’s too much, somehow, Cosima’s fingertips against her, the incidental brushes of her hand against her clit. It’s too much and yet she can’t bring herself to stay _stop,_ not with the way it has drawn her taut and shaking, the way the barest touch has her gasping. She endures. She begs, even, with the entreating grip of her hands and the soft panting that she can hear echo embarrassingly in the air. It is too much; it is more than she can bear; it is not enough and it will never be.

There’s a hollowness to the orgasm. Cosima seems to be able to tell; she retires her hand to Delphine’s hip momentarily but her teeth press bruising marks into Delphine’s shoulder and keep her from retreating unsatisfied. After a few minutes, Cosima returns her hand to its place and slides one, two, three fingers into her. The stretch of it, edging on pain, the sensation of it being almost too much—it feels _right,_ and she bites down hard on Cosima’s lip as her only way to react without crying out. Her hands grip Cosima’s sides and her nails are digging deep but she can’t bring herself to stop, with the stroke of Cosima’s fingers inside her and the grind of the heel of her hand against her clit, the steady dull pressure setting her stunningly on the edge.

She is set alight starting in her fingertips, in the soles of her feet. The room fades; she can’t tell if her eyes are open or closed, only that the entire world is made of light. And then it passes. Her vision comes back, blurry at first, the glint of Cosima’s nose ring and the white flash of her teeth, and then she sees Cosima grinning at her and she lets out a long shuddering breath and collapses back onto the bed.

“Still got it?” Cosima asks, and Delphine tugs her down to lie with her on the pillows. “Give me,” she says, “a moment to recover.”

Cosima smirks. “I’ll take that as a yes,” she says, and Delphine wants very badly to smile like Cosima is smiling, but even in her limp exhaustion she is thinking of Cosima bloodstained, Cosima skinny and fading. She pulls her closer and falls asleep gripping her hands with all the strength she has.


	4. Day Four

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings: illness & death as usual, also parental death specifically

Cosima is still in bed when Delphine wakes up. She is staring at the ceiling.

“Cosima,” Delphine murmurs.

“Remember how I said I was okay with dying?”

“Mm.” She is still trying to remember: where she is, why she is not wearing any clothing, why Cosima is talking about death.

“I…don’t actually think I am.”

“Mm,” says Delphine. “This is common, I think.”

She doesn’t seem to hear. “I could have let that truck hit us yesterday.”

“You reacted instinctively.” She wants to add that Cosima would not harm innocent bystanders, but she would not feel honest referring to herself as either.

Cosima shakes her head, still looking up. “I don’t want to die.”

“I do not want you to die either,” says Delphine simply.

They check out in a haze. Delphine offers cash to the concierge and Cosima coughs into a tissue. They skip breakfast; Cosima’s knuckles are so white against the steering wheel that Delphine is afraid to ask her to stop.

The landscape is changing again. After a few hours the farmland falls away and they begin to climb in elevation; when Delphine opens her water bottle it belches the denser sea-level air at her.

“You have never told me about your parents.” There should be other things to talk about, but Delphine cannot think of them. Besides, she has had a suspicion from the beginning that they are heading west for a reason, and she is feeling deeply unprepared.

“They’re dead,” she says, and the road before them seems to pitch. Delphine feels seasick. “Dad when I was twelve, Mom in undergrad.” The wry smile she offers hurts to look at.

“I am sorry,” says Delphine. It sounds insincere to her ears, but the words ache in her chest. “Then what—?”

She stops herself, but Cosima anticipates her question. “What’s in San Fran now?” She shakes her head. “First place that popped into my mind. Don’t know why I—it’s not even warm there.” Her laughter rasps in her throat. “There’ll be some nice days, though. I just, like—really didn’t want to die in Toronto.”

“You hate Toronto so much?”

“It’s so far from home,” says Cosima, and something in her voice sounds like it has broken. But she continues on, conversationally. “My dad totally broke my heart, actually,  when I was ten. I came home all excited about being, like, an astronaut, because in class we learned about the moon and watched the Neil Armstrong video, you know, and my dad was like, now, you know you have to leave _Earth_ to do that? And I wouldn’t even go to, like, summer camp.”

“You moved so far, though,” says Delphine. “To Minnesota.”

Cosima shrugs. “Kinda felt like there was nothing—uh—keeping me there, after my mom died. But then, you know. Turns out I still hate being away.” She’s silent for a moment. “I really hate the snow,” she says finally, and the ferventness of it makes Delphine’s chest ache.

“I like it,” she says. She is looking out at the road stretched ahead of them, the mountains in the distance with their white peaks. “It snows at home,” she adds by way of explanation, perhaps commiseration.

They climb higher and higher into the mountains. They pass elevation signs, and Cosima offers an update every time she sees one. “Six hundred feet!” she reports, and Delphine responds, “One hundred and eighty meters.” Before Cosima can begin calculating in her head, she adds, “approximately.”

They stop at a deli for lunch. Cosima’s appetite seems to be returning; she orders a Reubenand devours it before popping several ibuprofen and grinning at Delphine. “Someday they’ll develop a real painkiller that still lets you operate a motor vehicle.”

“Perhaps.” She reaches under the table to squeeze just above Cosima’s knee. “Are you in very much pain?”

Cosima forces a laugh. “Oh, you know.”

“We can find a place to stay close to here, if you are too tired to drive much farther.”

“Yeah, that’d be, uh—yeah.” She drums her fingers on the table waiting for Delphine to finish her own food. “We should get gas on the way, though; we’re getting super low.”

“Of course.” It is their seventh refill of the car’s surprisingly greedy gas tank.

The hotel they find is in a tourist area, only a few miles from the ski slopes, and it is the most unsettlingly friendly place they’ve been. The concierge at the front desk smiles and offers them a dozen brochures for tourist activities, and Cosima takes all of them, grinning back at the short-haired person in the blue polo shirt. By the time they finish their conversation, Cosima has managed to talk her way into the honeymoon suite and a complimentary bottle of champagne. The suite turns out to be decorated, horrifyingly, in a garish red and pink. The bathroom contains his-and-hers towels, which Cosima greets with a wink at Delphine. “You want to be the ‘his,’ or should I? Never was totally clear on this part of our relationship.” Delphine’s mouth opens and closes for a moment before Cosima grins, and she realizes belatedly that Cosima is _joking._

“Are we honeymooning, then?” she asks with a smile.

“Wedding, funeral,” Cosima replies, shrugging, echoing Delphine’s sentiments from a few nights before. Then she grins back to match the curve of Delphine’s lips. “But I mean, you know, might as well make it official.” She grips Delphine’s hands and Delphine is only shocked by the panic she does _not_ feel at the sudden motion. “Delphine Cormier,” she says, “will you spend the rest of my life with me?”

The unexpected pronoun— _my_ life—leaves her with her mouth half-open. And then Cosima is smiling altogether too much and it hits her, again, embarrassingly late: “You’re joking.”

“Yeah.” Cosima winks. “I mean, not totally, because like, I _am_ dying, and it’d be kinda cool of you to wait to move on until after I’m dead, but like—I wasn’t planning on stopping at a courthouse.”

“Of course,” says Delphine. “I have told you—I am not leaving.”

“I promise, I’m totally trying to believe you. You’re not gonna, like, die on me, right? I’ve got dibs.”

Enough people have left her—that part goes unspoken, but it’s in the desperate grip of her hands, betraying her forcedly casual voice and smile. Delphine cannot come up with more words of comfort, so instead she kisses her, kisses the worry from her mouth and the tears from her cheeks. She wants to kiss the pallor from her skin, but it lingers no matter the marks she bites into Cosima’s flesh; the angry redness does nothing to lessen the gray cast to her skin. Delphine is not, normally, the kind of lover for viciousness, but her desperation sharpens her teeth.

“Jesus, Delphine,” says Cosima with a gasp.

“You are all right?”

Cosima, breathless, nods, and Delphine moves in closer and crushes her against the wall, biting a bruise into her lip. With Delphine bent to reach her neck, Cosima gasps above her head. “You gonna jump me already? It’s not even—dinner time.”

Delphine draws up, laughing, and presses her forehead against Cosima’s. “Was that an innuendo?”

“Wasn’t meant to be.” Cosima grins, and Delphine can feel it in her hands on Cosima’s cheeks. “You’re getting a feel for the sex jokes, though, I’ll give you that.” She kisses Delphine once more before turning her body just enough that Delphine no longer has her pressed against the wall. “For real, though, I need to get some of this shit out of my lungs and, like, maybe break out the strong stuff.”

“Of course.” Delphine trips over her feet stepping backward, but steadies.

“How d’you feel about room service?”

“Excellent.” She smiles. “Unless you expect me to drink half a bottle of champagne on an empty stomach.

“I mean, not that that doesn’t sound hilarious, but I’m actually starving.” She winks. “Give me a sec, though.” She excuses herself to the bathroom and Delphine sits on her bed and turns on the TV; she raises the volume higher and higher until the sound of Cosima’s harsh, hacking coughs seems no louder than a whisper. It’s still there, though, no matter how loud she makes the voices of the detectives onscreen. It’s childish to try to block it out, but the sound makes her feel trapped, like an animal, like she wants to claw at her own skin, or Cosima’s, in order to escape.

Cosima emerges after what feels like a very long time, still wiping the last smears of blood from her lips. Delphine turns down the volume, and Cosima bounds onto the bed and settles in next to her. “Who d’you think did it?”

“The father.” She nods to the shape on the screen. “He did not want the shame of a son with such a stigmatized disease.”

“So he killed him and left him totally available for blood tests? Bullshit.”

Delphine nudges Cosima with her shoulder. “I am not very good at this.”

“It’s cool; you’re good at more important things.” She grins. “Food?”

They call and order, and by the time their food comes, Delphine has realized her hunger. Her pasta is gone within minutes, and Cosima’s cheeseburger does not fare much better. By the time they place the tray onto the floor by the door, Delphine is starting to feel the champagne. She swallows the last sip left in her glass and places it on the tray next to Cosima’s.

“Hey,” says Cosima, when they are both on the bed again. The TV is off now, and Cosima’s thumb is tracing the contours of Delphine’s hand. “I, uh…love you.”

“I love you too.” The words come as they always do: easily. She cannot, she thinks, remember a time now that she did _not_ love Cosima. Cosima is threaded into her consciousness.

Cosima is threaded through her body as well at the moment; her legs are tangled with Delphine’s—clothed, in what seems currently a terrible shame—and her fingers and Delphine’s fingers are intertwined. Every bit of her skin is just a little warmer than it should be, and her breath is hot on Delphine’s neck, and it is dizzyingly awful and arousing all at once. She closes her eyes as she feels Cosima’s breath closer, and she lets Cosima’s mouth move hot on her skin, her only reaction a soft whimper and a tightening of her grip on Cosima’s hands. They fall asleep after a while, Cosima first, leaving Delphine to look into the darkness as the warm satisfied glow from Cosima’s tongue on her skin subsides, as she begins to feel like the walls are closing in. She needs something to hold, wants desperately to pull Cosima closer—and doesn’t touch, for fear of waking her.


	5. Day Five

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings: illness & death as usual, brief rape mention

Delphine wakes to the sight, now comfortingly familiar, of Cosima doing her eyeliner in the mirror. There is a small pile of red and white tissues next to her. “Morning,” she says, seeing Delphine’s movement reflected in the mirror. (“Good morning,” Delphine murmurs back, still groggy.) “We’re almost to the desert,” says Cosima. “Should be in Nevada by nighttime.”

“And that is…?” Her North American geography is a little fuzzy, especially at seven o’clock in the morning.

“Just one state over from California.” She smiles, toothily, in the mirror. “Plus it’s, like, one of my favorite places to drive.”

“I was under the impression that deserts were to be avoided.” She stumbles out of bed, rubbing her eyes blearily.

Cosima cocks her head. “You’ve been misinformed, Doctor Cormier.” Winks. “It’s empty and totally beautiful, no one around for miles.”

_That doesn’t sound safe,_ Delphine wants to say, _especially for someone who’s seriously ill._ “It sounds lovely,” she says instead.

They check out from the hotel with the grinning, short-haired concierge, and they are on the road early. They head back down in elevation, watching the numbers go lower as they near the edge of the mountains, and then they level out and the road stretches out endlessly in front of them. Cosima is right, at least, that it’s beautiful—in an empty, stark kind of way. Spiky, scrappy plants somewhere between trees and bushes have sprung up on the landscape, which has an orange cast to it and looks devastatingly empty.

It is almost evening (the shadows growing long and blue, the orange of the sand deepening) when the car makes a quiet sputtering sound and Cosima steers it off the road.

They sit in silence for a moment, listening to the space in the air where the engine sound should be. Then Cosima turns the key, and the car makes a desperate whining sound until she releases the pressure. “Shit,” she says, and Delphine thinks this is a bit of an understatement.

They sit. The sound in the engine dies completely.

“Hey.” Cosima turns. “Where’s your phone?”

Delphine raises her eyes to Cosima’s, which look, behind her glasses, more than a little nervous. “It ran out of battery at lunch.” Before Cosima can look horrified, Delphine reminds her, “You downloaded a dozen trivia games.”

“Yeah, uh…so, I let my phone die like three days ago.” She looks at Delphine out of the corner of her eye. “Sarah kept calling.”

“I never heard it.”

“Oh it was, uh, on silent. I just, you know, her name kept lighting up…”

Delphine reaches across the divider to take Cosima’s hand in hers. “Do you—”

Cosima shakes her head. “Hey, don’t, okay?” She glances around. “Any ideas?”

Delphine laughs helplessly. “We should have brought a plug for the car?”

“Yeah.” After one more look around the car, as if she were going to find something new, Cosima opens the door.

“Cosima, where are you—”

She turns to look over her shoulder, grinning. “We’re stuck in the middle of nowhere. Might as well enjoy it.”

Delphine looks out at the gathering darkness, the deep blue and orange of the desert night, and pushes open the door of the car. She steps out and her boots sink into the sand, just enough to make walking difficult, and she blinks into the darkness, waiting for her eyes to lose the memory of the light in the car. As it starts to fade she can make out the silhouette of Cosima leaning back to rest on her elbows on the hood. “Come here,” she says, soft, and Delphine goes up after her. The hood is still warm from the engine, and Delphine presses her palms against it. She feels cold, against all reason.

Closer, Delphine can see that Cosima has taken off her shoes, and her bare feet are pressed against the hood, knees pointing up, toes curled off the edge. She makes a low, comfortable sound when Delphine scoots closer to her, and Delphine, thinking that resting her admittedly bony elbows on the hard metal would not be ideal, lies back. Cosima settles back next to her, the ropes of her hair making soft thudding sounds as they hit the hood.

“We are stargazing again,” Delphine points out.

“Yeah,” says Cosima, but her voice sounds reverent, almost absent, even as her thumb traces circles on the back of Delphine’s hand. It seems not Delphine’s place, somehow, to say anything more. She turns her hand, palm facing upward, and interlaces fingers with Cosima, stroking the side of her hand with her thumb. Cosima squeezes her hand, but the gesture still has a vague sense of absence. It’s the way of things, isn’t it, these days; Delphine looks at Cosima and Cosima looks at the sky.

She watches Cosima’s lips part, and then hesitate. After a pause, Cosima asks: “Do you believe in anything?”

Delphine hums a noncommittal reply. “In what way?”

“Like…after.”

The words knot painfully in her stomach. She closes her eyes for a moment, letting the entirety of her consciousness focus on the warmth of Cosima’s hand in hers and the spot where the sides of their legs are pressed close together. “I don’t know.” Pause. “I never needed to.” She opens her eyes again to look at Cosima’s silhouette in the darkness.

“Me neither.” Cosima sighs, the exhalation visible in the contraction of her ribcage, the fall of her belly.  “But now…” She gestures with the hand not grasping Delphine’s, a vague trailing of her fingers through the starlight. “I don’t want it all to just…end.”

“Well I suppose, if it does, you won’t have time to be disappointed.”

It’s not meant to be a joke, but Cosima lets out a bark of surprised laughter anyway. “No, I guess I won’t.” The laughter in her quiets easily, and she settles back against the hood again. “I don’t know what I want instead, though.”

“Not wings and a trumpet?” Delphine teases.

Cosima chuckles. “I used to play trumpet in high school, you know. But nah.” She shrugs. Delphine can’t see it, from her vantage point, but she feels the motion of Cosima’s shoulder against hers. “I used to think about it a lot, in undergrad. I always thought it would be nice to see my mom again.”

Delphine hums in response, and squeezes Cosima’s hand.

“I don’t know what I want anymore.” She sighs, a long low breath that deflates her chest. “I just want this again. But better.”

“Better,” Delphine repeats.

“Yeah. Like, my parents are here, I’m not part of some bullshit corporate science project, and maybe I stay alive long enough to have sex with you more than, like, five times.”

Delphine does not think she can squeeze Cosima’s hand any tighter than she is doing right now, so instead she leans over to press her lips to Cosima’s cheek. “I imagine,” she says, “if we make a concerted effort, we can increase that number to at least ten.”

Cosima murmurs, “Good,” and the word ends in soft laughter.

They lie in silence and Delphine’s stomach rolls with tension, something like nausea that feels sudden but inevitable. “Cosima,” she says, and it feels blurted, like starting a course of action she cannot take back.

“Yeah?”

“There is something I need to tell you.”

“Okay,” she says. Her voice sounds steadier than Delphine feels.

“It is something about…when I was your monitor. And only your monitor.” Cosima’s silent, staring at the sky. Delphine looks over, waiting for a response; when she gets none, she forges on. “Ald—Doctor Leekie and I had, ah, a relationship that…went beyond the strictly professional.”

There is a long silence in which Delphine considers leaving to walk down the empty road. “Cosima?” she asks again, finally.

“Just a second,” she says. “I need to, like, vomit over the side of the car.” She makes no attempt to move. Delphine’s teeth dig into her lip, enough that she feels that she might draw blood.

“Cosima—”

“Please. Don’t—say anything.” She stares resolutely at the sky. Her arms are crossed over her chest. Delphine can see the set of her chin in silhouette, the thrust of it, the anger in her. There are tears in her eyes, moonlit.

Delphine says nothing. The evening chill settles in her bones; Cosima’s edged away from her and the engine beneath the hood has gone cold.

“Why?”

She has been waiting for Cosima to speak, watching the preparative inhalations with her insides knotting, and now she doesn’t know what to say.

“Like…” Cosima sits up to cross her legs on the hood, facing Delphine. Delphine follows suit, grateful to look her in the eye. “Did he—I dunno. I mean, he was your boss, right—”

Delphine’s teeth are making a dent in her lip. “It was never, ah…nonconsensual, if that is what you’re asking.”

“Yeah. Uh.”

Delphine’s breath comes out of her heavily. She does not begrudge Cosima the hope that glimmered in her for a moment; easier, to be sure, to think of her as a victim.

“Then why?”

“It…” She does not look away from Cosima, even as she struggles to express herself. “It is easy to be swept up. To feel that you are doing something important and dangerous together. Such feelings can lead to…”

“Yeah, okay, I get it.” She looks down, away.

“I’m sorry to bring this up now,” Delphine says. “But I thought you should know. If you are to forgive me, you should know the entire truth.”

Cosima doesn’t look at her.

“You do not have to forgive me.”

The soft glow from the horizon is gone now, and the car that zoomed by while they were talking seems to have been the only one of its kind. It’s hard to see in the dark, but Cosima pulls her knees to her chest, wraps her arms around them. She looks very, very small. “I’ll let you know,” she says.

They sit in silence, and then Delphine jerks up abruptly.

“What?”

“The computer. I can use it to charge my phone.”

Cosima smacks herself in the head, an exaggerated gesture that feels out of place. “Right.”

Delphine slides off the hood and digs out her laptop case from the backseat, opening her computer to a screen that feels blaringly bright. She plugs her phone into a USB port and waits for it to charge sufficiently, tapping her fingers on her thigh. Cosima has not moved from her place on the hood; the dark shape of her is an eerie presence outside the windshield.

Within minutes the phone has come to life again, and Delphine dials the number for roadside assistance that is listed on Cosima’s insurance documents. The operator’s voice is loud and jarring, but Delphine explains their situation as calmly as clearly as she can manage.

She emerges from the car and blinks, eyes refusing to adjust to the dark again. “They will be here in forty minutes,” she says to Cosima, who is still curled up, looking out into the desert.

“Good.”

Delphine leans against the car, her hip-bone pressed against it. “I love you,” she says. “Truly.”

Cosima is silent.

They stay that way until the assistance arrives, a man in an ugly car toting a box of tools. Cosima slides off the hood to let him poke around under it, and they stand at a distance, waiting. Cosima tugs the sides of her sweater together. She looks bony and frail and so, so small, and Delphine puts an arm around her with no more complexity of thought than _she’s cold._ Cosima pushes her away, roughly, and they stand together in silence, inches from touching. Cosima is shaking. Her hands, gripping the fabric of her sweater, look skeletal in the moonlight.

The repair is simple; when it’s done, Cosima exchanges cash with the repairman and he drives off in the direction they came from, kicking up sand as he pulls away. They return to their seats; Cosima turns the heat up high and heads back down the lonely road.

The sign of the motel they pull into is flickering; VACANCY, it flashes at them in neon. Delphine pays and they drag their suitcases into the ash-stained room.

Cosima sits on the end of the bed, shoes kicked off, stocking-feet dangling. Delphine is combing her fingers through her hair, feeling the grit of sand caught in it, trying not to look at Cosima in the mirror.

“We’ll be there tomorrow,” says Cosima, and Delphine feels _the end_ thudding in her heartbeat. She wants to keep driving; she thinks wildly of going down the coast and looping back, staying on the road. She forces herself to look at Cosima—expecting, probably, hurt/angry/quivering-lip Cosima.

Instead, Cosima looks very, very tired. The bags under her eyes have taken on the cast of bruises. “I hate that he touched you,” she says, but despite her best efforts, the words lack venom.

“I wish that he had not.” It is true on a physical level at least. But Aldous’ fingerprints are on more than her body, and she cannot make herself regret their other involvements quite so much.

She does not say so; does not speak again. (Cosima knows, doesn’t she. Delphine has never apologized.) She comes when Cosima beckons and folds her in her arms, fingers splayed across a fragile ribcage.


	6. Day Six

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Final chapter, minus the epilogue.
> 
> Warnings: illness & death as usual, minor drug use (like, just pot).

The world comes into view slowly, darker than expected: small static-ridden TV, peeling wallpaper imprinted with shadowy pictures of cacti in terracotta pots, a dark mass of luggage piled in the corner. It takes Delphine a moment to realize what is missing. She draws herself out of bed and goes to the sliding doors, pushes aside the blackout curtains and sees: Cosima on the balcony, languid, leaning against the railing. She has a joint between her fingers and as Delphine watches she opens her mouth to exhale smoke into the morning air. The sunrise is beginning behind her, a soft orange-pink glow at the horizon.

The backs of these rooms open onto the empty sand; there is a town a ways down the road and Delphine can make out the lit-up sign for a gas station, but if she follows the path of Cosima’s eyes all she can see is desert and the slowly coloring sky. She draws up next to Cosima, nudges the skinny arm resting on the railing. Her biceps are the most startling—bones and skin where before she was muscled and sinuous—but there is an all-over fullness that she lacks now with her bony hips and sagging clothes. Delphine looks over, watches the fluid motion of hand to mouth, listens to (tries not to listen to) the rattling of her lungs as she draws smoke into them.

“Hey,” says Cosima, once she has let the smoke plume from her mouth again. Her voice is low and comfortable; she clears her throat to lose some of the huskiness and by some miracle her breathing does not crack down the middle, does not choke with blood. “Good morning,” Delphine murmurs with a smile. Cosima offers her the joint and Delphine lets it rest between her fingers for a moment before taking an unpracticed drag, the smoke falling unruly out of her lips. She passes it back to Cosima, watching the smoke dissipate in the lightening sky; Cosima lets her hand drop to rest on the balcony and her head tilts to nestle in the crook of Delphine’s neck. Delphine wraps an arm around her narrow waist and tugs her close, thumb tracing circles on her side.

“Should we, perhaps, sleep a little longer?”

Cosima brings the joint to her lips again, lifting her head slightly to meet it. “You can,” she says, on the exhale. “I don’t think I can sleep now.” Tiredness is dragging down Delphine’s eyelids but her heart shudders in unreasonable panic at the thought of leaving Cosima alone on the balcony; instead, she pulls Cosima closer and lets her body heat Cosima’s shivering one.

She dozes there, leaning against the railing, over and over startling herself awake by leaning too far. It is a useless, miserable way to catch up on sleep, and she gives up finally, when the sky is brimming with light. The burned-out end of the joint is sitting discarded on the railing; Cosima pockets it.

Packing is quick, as always. Delphine puts on eyeshadow in the bathroom mirror, watches the world shift fully into focus when she puts in her contacts. They check out and load their bags back into the trunk of the station wagon. The sun is baking their shoulders, the road, the sand; heat shimmers above the desert in the distance, and Cosima looks at Delphine and smiles a lopsided smile. “Ready?” she asks, and it feels much too big a question for a single word.

“We will reach San Francisco tonight?”

“Barring major disasters, yeah.”

 _San Francisco._ The name tightens her chest all on its own. She forces a smile. “Ready,” she says, and moves into the passenger seat with a confidence that feels thoroughly ersatz.

They stop for gas down the road, and Delphine feels hyperaware of Cosima, the way she struggles pushing open the door, her shaky steps outside the car. It takes a long time of fumbling with the pump before gas starts flowing, and she can see Cosima’s fingers scrabbling at it. “Are you sure you don’t want me to drive for a while?” she asks, when Cosima gets back in the car.

“You don’t have a license, and I’m _fine.”_

“How is the pain today?”

She pulls out of the gas station and stares resolutely at the road in front of her. Delphine reaches over to squeeze her shoulder, and Cosima shrugs away the touch. Delphine takes her hand back and swallows her hurt. “Coffee?” she suggests, and Cosima pulls into the parking lot of a coffee shop on the edge of the scattered mess of a town. Their coffees are strong and blazingly hot, and they sip them at a table by the window.

“You have your ibuprofen, yes?”

“Please, Delphine,” Cosima says, and her voice cracks halfway through the first word.

“I am just worried for you.”

Cosima’s teeth are gritted. “One more day, okay? And then I can think about this again.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, and she thinks it might be the truth.

After pastries, they leave a generous tip for the broad-smiling waitress, and take to the road.

The sign welcoming them to California is like any number of similar signs they’ve passed, with the addition of another sign reminding them to wear their seatbelts. Delphine’s insides seize at the sight. “Almost there?” she asks, forcedly calm, and Cosima chuckles. “Not even close.” They pass by an agricultural checkpoint and are waved on without a stop or a search.

The desert turns to mountains. Cosima points out the window—Yosemite National Park, a glimpse of formations that Delphine has only seen in austere black-and-white photographs. She asks Cosima if she has visited, and Cosima nods. “With my dad, like, a thousand years ago.”

And then it’s gone. There is snow capping the peaks in the distance, but none in patches along the road; the mountains are a riot of green. Deer bound out of sight, and Delphine swears she sees a bear cub deep in the woods as they round a bend. So much life makes her ache.

Lunchtime comes and goes as they wind their way through the mountains, and probably all this skipping of meals is no good for either of them—but especially not for Cosima, who is stumbling more today when they step outside the car, whose leg shakes when she presses the gas pedal. Delphine offers a leftover cookie from the coffee shop, and Cosima shakes her head.

They leave the mountains behind them as the sun dips below the horizon, and the landscape turns to farmland once again. They stop at a diner in a dusty, empty town with an abundance of churches. The waitress greets them brightly and Delphine responds with as much enthusiasm as she can muster. “The last roadside diner for a while, do you think?” she asks Cosima, when they’ve been seated.

“Yeah, maybe forever,” says Cosima, and the lightness of her tone feels false.

They split a slice of chocolate cake and Cosima traps Delphine’s fork and between laughter and surreptitious chocolate-stained kisses by the car, Delphine forgets for an instant that she is escorting Cosima to her grave.

And then, of course, she remembers. It’s dark now and Cosima’s fingers have not stopped trembling all day and the cars going in the other direction scream by, all blaring headlights. Cosima has turned the radio on low and tuned to a station that plays music from bygone decades; Elvis croons at them through the static.

They come out of the valley, leaving behind the farmland in favor of more winding roads. Cosima switches radio stations almost compulsively, her energy crackling beneath her skin. Delphine watches through the windshield for a sign of water.

The roads have cleared out by the time they see it, leaving only a few other late-night drivers with them. Cosima’s shoulders visibly relax at the sight of the bridge.

“Not red,” Delphine notes.

“Nah, this is the Bay Bridge.” She makes her haphazard way over to the farthest-right lane and Delphine looks out to watch the dark water of the bay pass them by. It looks desolate, and she crosses her arms over her chest as if to hold her bones in place.

Cosima’s voice breaks through the isolation, soft and easy. “We can go to the Golden Gate, though, you know? If you wanted to see it. Not tonight, obviously, but maybe tomorrow.”

 _Tomorrow,_ Delphine thinks, and then she is crying.

“Hey, hey, Delphine—”

“I’m sorry,” she says. She cannot say: _I forgot that tomorrow existed; I forgot that this was not the end._ She wipes her cheeks with a tissue and looks ahead, into the lights of the city.

The hotel room they book is small for the price, but after the dingy roadside motels it is paradisal. Delphine scrubs off the grime from the road, and then wraps in a towel and draws her fingers through the tangled mess of her hair in front of the mirror. Cosima undresses beside her before stepping into the shower herself. She convulses briefly, choked coughs breaking through the sound of the water, and Delphine leaves the room.

After half an hour sitting on the bed flipping through channels, she thinks to check. “Cosima?” she calls, entering the bathroom.

“Delphine? Can you—”

She pulls aside the shower curtain to see Cosima, small and naked, sitting in the shower spray with her knees to her chest.

“I, uh, couldn’t stand so well anymore. Do you mind…?”

“Of course.” Delphine turns off the water and reaches for the towel hanging on the rack before gripping Cosima’s hands and helping her out of the tub. She wraps the towel around her shoulders and smooths it down, letting Cosima lean on her as they walk out to the bed.

Together they get Cosima into sweatpants and a baggy T-shirt, and she lets out a shuddering sigh; Delphine can see the exhaustion settling in her. She takes her first painkiller, washing it down with half a bottle of water, and the relief is visible in her. As she gets into bed, Cosima fixes her eyes on Delphine, who is still standing, waiting for her to make space. When she does not move or speak, Delphine murmurs,  “Is everything all right?”

Cosima shifts uncomfortably. “I, uh…I don’t think I can totally forgive you,” she says. “Like, maybe that’s horrible of me, I don’t know. I love you, and I get it.” She shrugs, the motion awkward in her bony shoulders. “But, Delphine, I was—you know—I was human before you knew me, too.”

Delphine nods slowly. Then, clear and even, she says, “All right.” She clicks off the light. As she climbs into bed, curling around Cosima’s smaller body, she presses a kiss to the back of her neck. “You know I love you, too,” she says, into the darkened expanse of Cosima’s skin.

“I know.” Delphine’s arm is wrapped around her, and Cosima tugs it closer to her chest. “Thank you,” she says. “For coming with me.”

“Of course.”

“Apartment-hunting tomorrow, yeah?”

Delphine kisses her skin again. “Tomorrow,” she echoes, like a prayer.


	7. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> epilogue, as in _after_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> illness & death warnings as usual

Cosima dies on a Tuesday.

On Wednesday Delphine calls Sarah and she never quite gets the words to leave her mouth, but Sarah seems to know from the moment she picks up the phone. “It’s Cosima, yeah?” she asks, and briefly Delphine thinks that she means she mistook Delphine’s voice for Cosima’s. But then a choked sob crackles through the bad connection, and Delphine says, softly, “Yes.”

There’s a tinny-sounding exchange— _What is it, mommy? It’s Auntie Cosima, baby; she’s—_ and Delphine hangs up quickly before she has to hear the rest. Then she sits on the couch in the apartment they shared and lets her head drop forward, covers her face with her hands and cries terrible, body-wracking sobs until her lungs can’t take any more, until it hurts to draw breath.

After what feels like a long time, she forces herself to get into bed. They’d taken, lately, to sleeping in separate beds on Cosima’s bad nights; Delphine’s cot is still there, but she crawls into the bed anyway. She hasn’t touched it since they took Cosima away. The sheets smell like blood and like rosewater, like the perfume Cosima took to dabbing on her neck (“Sexy, huh?”); Delphine begins to cry again at the scent of it, each breath sending stabbing pains through her chest.

It is six months of Tuesdays before she can get through one without crying. She goes back to Toronto, because there is nowhere else to go, and shows up toting her luggage at Felix’s door, just like before. She half-expects Cosima to be there waiting for her, furious but alive. Instead Sarah greets her and says “I’m so sorry, Delphine,” like she didn’t lose a sister. (Her hands betray her; they grip Delphine’s tightly enough to hurt.) They mourn in whiskey—Sarah drinks until she can cry, and Delphine drinks until she can stop. Sarah buries her face in Delphine’s chest, soaking the fabric of her sweater, and Delphine strokes her hair, drawing away the flyaway strands that have fallen in her face and curling them behind her ear. When Sarah has cried herself to sleep curled up on the couch, Delphine draws a blanket over her and sits alone in the dark, hollow.

Months after, a woman in a coffee shop asks her to dinner. It’s startling; she has never been asked on a date by any other woman, and she wonders if the shadow of Cosima’s lips is so prominent.

She wants, for a moment, to say yes. The woman is tall, taller than Delphine, dark-skinned with sharp eyes and intense brows, and she seems for a moment like somebody Delphine could kiss without summoning the still-fresh ache in her. There is something, though, in the easy way she moves—instead, Delphine goes home and holds herself as she cries.

It takes some creative explanation of her extended period with the now-dismantled DYAD Group, but she obtains a professorship at a university and finds herself teaching cell biology to undergraduates and researching limb regrowth in lizards. It suits her more than she expected; she finds that people listen when she speaks, that she can obtain quiet command of a lecture hall. The mundane activities of a professorship are soothing: departmental meetings, writing grant proposals, holding office hours. She hires graduate students, oversees thesis defenses. Tries not to imagine Cosima’s hands sculpting the outline of her thesis in the air. Tries not to think how much Cosima would love a place like this.

…Would have loved.

It’s harder than she could have ever imagined, to reshape her thoughts in past tense.

Cosima procured a promise from her, a few weeks into their life in San Francisco: _Don’t, like, pine for me forever, okay? I don’t want to look back from the afterlife and see you getting zero action._ She began, in those months, to make reference to “the afterlife”—or, by turns, Heaven, Hell, Elysium (“Think I could get a god to recommend me?”). It always had the sheen of a joke, but there was something desperate beneath it.

“What do you _really_ believe?” Delphine asked her, once, and Cosima shrugged. “Returning to the earth, I guess. Worm’s meat, and all that. All my molecules scattered into the universe.”

“Is that comforting?”

Cosima smiled wryly. “Not enough,” she said. “I mean, cool and all, but I was kinda into, like, consciousness, you know?”

“You want a soul.” The words came easily, simply.

She almost lied, almost downplayed it—Delphine could see it in her. But instead she said, “Yeah. Basically.”

Delphine tries, in the months after, to believe in souls—tries to believe that Cosima is watching over her, somehow—but the world seems emptier and bleaker than it has ever been.

She fills it, slowly—fills it with good espresso and the crooked smile of a pretty coworker and the cherry blossom petals that catch in her hair in the springtime. She stitches herself together again, rebuilds herself in a new sweater and coffee with Sadie-with-the-lopsided-smile, in leaning out the apartment window late at night and drinking in the moon.

It doesn’t go away. Sometimes she wishes it would; her dreams are haunted with memories and she wakes up dehydrated and wishes to forget. She is thirty-five—forty—forty-five—and the way the checkout girl cocks her head still makes tears sting her eyes, and she hurries out of the store, hiding her face.


End file.
